I have heard it said over and over again that God does not lie and God does not break his covenants and therefore he will watch over an protect modern day Israel. John Hagee and countless Christian Zionist voices are saying to the Church that its role is to support and back up the nation of Israel or God will not bless us. They speak of God's prophetic time table and say that the Church age is coming to a close and God has now turned his attention back toward Israel in order to fulfill all that He has promised to the Jews. This dispensational Christian Zionist perspective has become extremely popular since Hal Lindsey and now Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have made it so with their New York Times best selling novels. If one thinks any other way other than these popular theological brands then one is immediately seen as out of touch at best and a heretic at worst. I believe the current popular brand of Left Behind Christian Zionism is wrong. In fact, I believe that it misses the message of the New Testament about Jesus and the Church almost entirely. Let me lay my cards on the table right off and tell you where they have gone wrong. They have missed it when it comes to who Israel really is and they have missed it when it comes to the message of Jesus about the way of the Cross. Now I know this is a serious charge. I will make it even more off putting by saying that they have missed who Jesus was and what he came to accomplish. I will go a step further and say that the miss the four Gospel's message altogether and if that were not enough, they misinterpret Paul and miss his message as well. They have missed defined the nature of the Church and do not understand at all what makes up the Church. Now that I have made these charges let me set out to back up my statements. I know I have made some bold statements, but hear me out and then agree or disagree with me. <bgsound src="http://stellamaris.vije.net/sons/classique/Haydn%20-%20Sérénade%20quatuor%20cordes%20op3%20n5.wma" loop="1"> First, Jesus is the true Israel. As the Messiah of Israel he represents them. Anyone that submits to his Messiahship or Kingship will be the subjects of the true Israel. Let me put it another way, Jesus came to reconstitute Israel in and around himself. If someone agrees with what I have just said then that someone cannot agree with the Christian Zionists claim that God has two people, namely the Church and Israel. This claim of the Christian Zionists is absolutely foreign to the New Testament. Let me demonstrate my claim that Jesus himself is the true Israel. Let us look first at the opening chapters of the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus was born in Bethlehem and Herod the Great learns that a so-called King of the Jews has been born and attempts to have him killed. Joseph is warned by an angel to flee with Jesus and so he takes him down to Egypt. After Herod's death Joseph brings Jesus back from Egypt and Matthew quotes a verse from Hosea 11:1 saying "Out of Egypt I called my son." Hosea does not have Jesus in mind when he says this but rather Hosea has in mind Exodus 4:22 which says "Then say to Pharaoh, 'This is what the Lord says: Israel is my firstborn son." Notice that it is Israel that is called son here and it is Israel that Hosea has in mind and not Jesus. However, Matthew has applied it to Jesus. Why? This is because Matthew sees Jesus as being in the role of and representing Israel. Look at what follows. Next we see Jesus coming to the Jordan to be baptized by John the Baptist. John is hesitant about Baptizing Jesus, because his baptism is a baptism that prepares the people of Israel for the coming Messiah. Jesus tells John that this baptism must be done in order to fulfill all righteousness. There is much to unpack from this statement and certainly there is symbolism here about the meaning of the destiny that Jesus ministry would take on in his death, burial, and resurrection. However that may be, Jesus is at least saying that the drama has to be played out right and he must completely identify with Israel. The children of Israel came through the water of the Sea and later the Jordan and Jesus by his action here is identifying with Israel. As soon as Jesus was baptized heaven was opened the Spirit of God descended upon him in the form of a dove and heaven was opened and a voice said "This is my beloved Son, with him I am well pleased" (Matt. 3:17). Notice the fact of Jesus being the Son is mentioned again. From there Jesus goes into the wilderness to be tempted for forty days and forty nights. In Exodus, Moses went up on the mountain for forty days and forty nights in order to receive the Law and while he was there the children of Israel gave up waiting and made a golden calf and bowed down to worship. They failed the test in the wilderness when it came to idolatry, faith for food and water and in several other ways, but Jesus would not fail. He proved to be faithful where Israel had failed. It is my contention that Jesus identified with Israel and went through the same drama and experience that they went through and proved himself as the faithful and true Israel, i.e. the Son of God (Jesus was the second person of the Trinity, but this is not what Matthew means by Son).
In Matthew the 19th chapter, in response to Peter explaining that he and his fellow disciples had left every thing to follow Jesus, Jesus says, "I tell you the truth, at the renewal of all things, when the son of man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel" (Matt. 19:2Cool. Jesus goes on to say that many who are first will be last and many who are last will be first. Here is another clear sign that Jesus is the Messiah and is reconstituting Israel around himself by declaring the new patriarchs of the twelve tribes that will be the new judges in the vein of the Judges of the Old Testament. One can debate what Jesus meant by the renewal of all things. The most likely meaning is that Jesus saw himself as constituting the renewal of all things that would start at his resurrection from the dead. Jesus clearly saw himself as doing something new. When he talks about the fact that you cannot take new wine and put it in old wineskins because it would burst them and you cannot take a new patch and put it on an old garment, because it would pull away, he is not giving advise on wine storing techniques and neither does he wish to convey to them anything about what to do about thread bear clothes. No, he is saying that the new thing he is doing (He is also invoking Isaiah 43:19 here) is not something that can be perceived or handled by the old Jewish regime. He does not come to restore the old, but to bring the Jews into the new act of making Israel over again. What does this mean? It means that Jesus was the true Israel and was reconstituting Israel around himself. It also means that the Christian Zionists are wrong in their view of modern day Israel. Why? Because the Church itself is a Jewish rooted and grounded movement that's very foundation is built upon Jesus and the Apostles who were all Jewish. Just because Gentiles were added it does not negate the fact that fact that the Church is the new Israel, not because the Jewish people have been rejected and replaced with the Church, but because Jesus the true Jew has made everyone that puts faith in him a true Jew. <bgsound src="http://www.shedletsky.com/jjshed/kulture/music/Daniele%20Giorgi/Haydn/02%20Adagio.mp3" loop="1"> With whom did Jesus start the Church? The answer is with the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah and Zephaniah all speak of the remnant of Israel. Micah 4:7 says "I will make the lame a remnant, those driven away a strong nation. The Lord will rule over them from Zion from that day and forever." Jesus came healing the lame, the blind, the leprous and making them part of the new Israel. Luke records that Jesus wend to a tax collector's house name Zacchaeus and ate at his house (to eat with someone was an act of accepting them) declaring that on that very day salvation had come to Zacchaeus' house. Zacchaeus announced that he was going to sell half of everything and give it to the poor and whoever he had defrauded would be paid back four times as much. Jesus then states "This man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and save that which was lost" (Luke 19:9-10 NIV). Notice Jesus is naming who is in and essentially who is out as a son of Abraham. He rejects the Temple and its establishment as bankrupt with his actions in Mark 10 where he curses the fig tree, goes in and condemns the Temple and then comes back out and explains the meaning of the fig tree. Sandwiched in between the cursing of the fig tree and the explanation about what that event meant is what happened at the Temple. The meaning of the Temple action is found in Jesus' explanation of the cursing of the fig tree. He also pronounces judgment against the Scribe and the Pharisees in a series of woes. John the Baptist's preaching announced the axe being laid at the root of the tree of Israel and every tree not bringing forth the fruit would be cut down and burned. Only a remnant of the Jews would listen to Jesus and get in on what Jesus was doing. The same is true today in that only a few Jews are coming to Jesus. My point has been to show that the Church was started by Jesus as a Jewish movement and a reconstitution of Israel out of the remnant of the lost sheep of the house of Israel. It is often said of replacement theology that it teaches that God rejected the Jews and replaced them with the Gentiles. This is not true. Neither is it true that God has one covenant with the Church which is made up predominantly of Gentiles and another covenant with modern day Israel that goes back to Abraham and Moses. The truth is that the Church is a Jew-plus-Gentile movement that puts faith in Jesus as the true Israel, Messiah, and fulfiller of the Law and the prophets. There is much more that could be added to this and I have just barely touched on the evidence Personally, I don't even believe that Jews have ever been The Chosen People (I explained why several days ago), but if you do, consider what I wrote above..
ROTFLOLOL!!!. The Khazar myth is long ago debunked poppycock that has no scientific support whatsoever. It was a mainstay of Russian intellectual antisemites in the 1970's. But it is pure fiction. Publisher's material is both dated and derivative, as usual. But what else does one expect from a lying neo-Nazi skinhead sub-moron? The idea that modern Jews were all descended from Jewish Khazar's is directly contradicted by genetic evidence, which suggests on the contrary, via studies of two markers on the Y-chromosome, that among all geographically distributed groups of modern Jews, the male Kohainim all had a common ancestor living in the Middle East circa 3500 years ago. Some of the ruling class of Khazaria, it's true, did convert to Judaism in the past, when they were faced with the choice between Islam and Orthodox Christianity. But that's all that lies behind the myth. Modern Jews did not come from Khazaria. In fact, it appears that the great majority of Jews who settled in Russia and Eastern Europe were of German origin. They migrated first to Poland, Latvia and Lithuania after being expelled from the Lutheran areas of what became modern Germany during the Reformation. This jibes with the fact that Yiddish, the common language of Eastern European Jews was basically a dialect of German, with many Slavicisms thrown in. `Publisher''s repetition of this old chestnut is simply one more proof that he is a slimy Jew-hater, and an ignoramus to boot. It's interesting in view of the current post, that he posts his garbage to a website in Czechoslovakia. http://ltradlice1.wz.cz/PLATO2/eps.tein.htm It's interesting also that PLATO2, one of his pseudonyms here at ET appears in the link. As for the rest of the garbage he's added to this thread, I have no intention whatever of debunking all of it. Life is too short. When I have found out who he is, I'll report him to Mossad and the JDL I've shown him to be a repeater of lies and a liar. He has no answer to the points that I have made, and his silence on those points will speak volumes to those who have ears to hear.
In addition: there is no such thing as a group of people called `Semites.' There is no such racial/ethnic group. There is a family of languages called Semitic languages, but the idea, current among German linguists of the late 19th century and Nazis of the 20th century, that these languages are associated with a particular racial/ethnic group, is now discredited.
I let common sense decide, not some tricked Israeli pseudo-scientific theory. An Ashkenazi/Khazarian Jew to the right and a Sephardic Jewess to the left. According to "dpt", both are members of the same racial community who walked out of the holy land 2000 years ago. In order to prove your point, a test on more than 442 Jews should be carried out. Until then the Khazarian/Koestler thesis remains valid.
I have no idea why I'm getting in the middle of this, but wasn't Julius Epstein a writer? I think the guy's name is Jeffrey Epstein. Anyway, continue on with your religious war.... TNG
Two decent articles about the Khazar myth are to be found here: http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/wais/cgi-bin/index.php?p=811 And here: http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/5425.html#10